The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History

Chapters 4 and 5 shift the focus from the dynasty to understanding the nature of society that flourishes under them. Although this may seem to be straying from Ibn Khaldun’s goal of creating a new philosophical science of historiography, in fact it is essential to it. As he stated in his Introduction, a critical historian needs to understand the capabilities of different societies in order to judge whether to accept the claims of his sources. Furthermore, he argues that the existence of civilization is not a timeless fact, but rather, arose as a result of historical events.

Therefore, civilization and its characteristics belong to the effects of Causes of Historical Change. Royal authority compels the creation of towns, and then the concentration of crafts comes from the concentrated wealth. Individual towns do not prosper forever and even great cities may fall. Ibn Khaldun says that “the life of the dynasty is the life of the town” (263). Government expenditure causes the growth of the capital and favored trading towns; the fall of the dynasty removes the basis of some such cities and may even lead to their abandonment, as happened to many great Near Eastern cities of antiquity.

Ibn Khaldun offers a sophisticated discussion of economics. One could find many ways that he “anticipates” later Western economic ideas. His insistence on silver and gold as the fixed, unchanging yardstick for measuring wealth will be reflected in later mercantilism. Grounding value in labor will be foundational for Marxist economics. Understanding how relative scarcity drives prices will be a key aspect of Adam Smith’s market economy.

Simply seeing Ibn Khaldun as a forerunner of later European ideas, however, does not do justice to his system in its own contemporary context. Medieval societies tended to be suspicious of valorizing making money for its own sake and instead focused on the wider moral and social context. Islam, whose founding prophet had a career as a merchant, valued merchants more than some other cultures, but Ibn Khaldun clearly demonstrates the limits of that attitude: “Honest traders are few” (312), he asserts; most “cheat and defraud and perjure themselves” (313). He attributes the pervasiveness of lying and vice among merchants to the profits that can be made through trickery or cunning. Honest men quickly lose their profits unless they are of such high rank that people fear to cross them.

Ibn Khaldun acknowledges that merchants might earn profits by the useful labor of transporting goods from their source to places lacking them, but also says they can use “cunning” to hoard goods (including necessary staples like food) until they are scarce and then sell them for high prices. For a society that values charity to the poor, selling food at high prices when famine threatens is easily classified as evil. For Ibn Khaldun, economics cannot be understood outside of its moral, religious, and social dimensions. The basis of this science is that God created everything that humans use and ordained it for specific purposes.

As may be inferred by Ibn Khaldun’s allowance that upper-class men might engage in trade without falling into vice, his social view of the economy comes from an elite, male perspective. One of the worst things he can say about merchants is that, due to their reliance on cunning and vice, “manliness is completely alien to them, beyond their power to acquire” (313). Manliness is equated with virtue. For Ibn Khaldun, the freedom and toughness of the desert represents both virtue and masculinity. The luxuries of civilization soften rulers and sedentary citizens, making them prone to vice. He singles out the employment of servants as an example of this degeneracy: It is a “weakness and effeminacy that ought to be avoided in the interest of manliness” (300). He, however, excuses the employing of servants as the understandable ignorance of elites following custom. He has only contempt, however, for those who serve. He ignores the social realities of those born poor and assumes that a servant would only accept his position due to being either too incompetent to earn a living or enmeshed in vice. Women, meanwhile, play little role in his analysis except for some positive remarks on how essential the craft of midwifery is.